Now, originally the plan was to record a xmas episode of AE Plays. This (despite many attempts) did not come together. :V
So pretty, my goodness.
However, I still wish to wish you all a happy Christmas, or other holiday of your choice.
Expect this week to be TOR heavy, with a TOR post in the pipes for probably Wednsday, and AE Plays TOR on Thursday/Friday/Saturday (whenever it is recorded, really).
Posted in Rants
Well, the title more or less gives away the point of this post. I’ve been playing TOR since the 15th-ish. Depends on who you ask, and where you’re from.
A lady defined by her love of hats. I can't blame her. Hats are great.
The point of this post is to be a discussion of what I’ve done over the last few days, in as many words as I can remember in. You’ll have to wait a week or so (at least) before I can really talk about how I feel about the game in great detail.
Most of my playtime has been spent on my Jedi Sage. She’s a pretty nice lady, who likes to help all the people with their problems, mostly in exchange for XP and light-side points.
While I’ll go into the group-based exploits of my character in more detail again, at a later date, I can and will reveal that I spent a significant amount of time grouping through portions of my 30 levels. Specifically, I grouped with people (specifically just Kiki) for all of Coruscant, Taris and Nar Shaddaa.
This was good fun. Although I wish we’d done a tiny bit more together, I’m at about 690/750 social points towards Social II, which unlocks more social gear (pretty dresses, fancy hats). Social points are earned by doing conversations in a group, and are gained pretty slowly. Still, it’s no biggie. I’m happy to be Social I, otherwise I’d not be able to have my fancy hat. (That I don’t use because better stats elsewhere, but it’s cool looking, so that’s something)
Let’s also talk about class quests. This probably won’t be so much of a problem if you’re soloing and taking the time to do all the missions and stuff, but these are hard to solo below the intended level. Not impossible, I know I did many 2-4 levels higher than my own, although that made them annoyingly difficult. I am slightly ashamed to say, but I may of ragequit from one particularly annoying boss. In my defense I’d been awake too long? Went and ground out gear & another level and kicked his ass.
I’ve also just started playing my Imperial Agent. She’s great. Like, super great. While her first companion isn’t as cool as the Bounty Hunter’s, she’s got a great voice, and she’s written well.
Anyway, this post has actually been sitting here a whole day, while I tried to think about anything else I wanted to say right at this stage.
Posted in Rants, The Old Republic
Tagged hats, I fucking love hats, swtor, Twi'lek
Now, before I begin, this post deserves a bit of explanation. Largely, this post was spurred by seeing someone tweet about how raiding (in the context of WoW) needed a higher skill floor, and then my own tweets on the subject. This segued into a bit of a talk about raiding in general, and then I came to compose this, in a format where I can use more than 140 characters at a time.
As such, I can’t promise this post will not contain some less than positive opinions about raiders. If you self-identify as a raider, if that is a thing that you do, and enjoy doing, you may not want to continue reading, and leave this post well alone. If you do, anything I say isn’t to be taken personally, but maybe you should have more fun doing that thing you do.
(Good job, self, write a post that might offend pretty much most people who will read this. Woo~)
Posted in Rants
Most of this post was written last night, but then I got distracted with food/life/etc. So it’s not going up ’till now. Whoops. :x
This was at 6am server time. I was fairly impressed, actually.
The title kinda says it all, doesn’t it? Today’s post won’t be super fancy, as I’ve spent an ungodly amount of time this weekend playing TOR. I’m not going to lie. In the interests of pointless statistics, however, I am going to share some things with the class, and how they match up with my projected times for things.
So, since the “Summer of Gaming” post, most of my gaming time has been spent playing Skyrim and TOR and some other shit. Thanks to Steam, I have some more concrete stats on the subject, however.
In addition, this weekend I played a metric fuckton of TOR. As I keep saying. The beta weekend closed up an hour and a half-ish ago as I write this, and in the ~3.5 days I had to play, I spent somewhere in the region of 45-50 hours playing the game. As it counts towards my 200 ‘scheduled’ hours, I’m going to tax them at half rate because it’s really outside the scope of playing the game proper (my progress has been wiped, and now we await live)
As such, I’ve decided to count it as 20 hours towards my 200 done, not that it looks like I’ll need it, it seems. I imagine I’ll probably knock another 100 odd hours off in the first week or two, hopefully that’ll get me to 50, although I am unsure. That is my goal for new years, so that’s that.
Speaking of TOR, the next episode of Arcane Envoy plays that will be about it will (probably) not be on the 24th/25th, but will most likely on the 31st/1st. This is because I don’t really want to record again ’till I’ve experienced the game properly. That being said, I imagine that there will be quite a few posts about the game during that period. (Probably a couple in addition to normal posts?)
I have a secret plan for that episode, which may or may not happen. I’m playing it close-ish to my chest (for the immediate time being), worst case I can do a modified version of it. Maybe. In addition, I’m thinking of doing something special for the Christmas episode, but we will see how that pans out as well.
In addition, you might of noticed a few changes to the blog’s layout, and I’m warning you not to be too alarmed. I’m just fiddling with a few ideas. (Can anyone say “Redesign Season”? By saying that I have basically jinxed the whole process, haven’t I? ><)
Posted in Rants
Once again, I am back, with the written word! HOOOYAH!
This feels really inefficient. Like, I’ve probably spent an hour on this, for something you’re going to take all of two minutes to read. Well, who cares, writing is good too.
Today, we’re talking about probably my RPG of the last decade (as in last 10 years, from 11/11/11 to 11/11/01) . What is it?
Oh yeah. Err, I mean *jumps through 4th wall* OHHHH YEAAAAHHHHH!
Yeah. I'm sorry to slug you with this right off the bat. :3
Okay, it’s a pretty old game (2002), but you know what? I’ve probably spent a ‘few hundred’ (understatement) hours in the provence of Morrowind, and every one was good. Except for the ones where I was being killed by Cliff Racers and Slaughterfish. Oh man. I hate those guys.
Seriously, those guys are jerks. Which is probably why they weren’t in Oblivion (not 100% sure about slaughterfish, but my memory is the bads).
A pretty big world, all yours to explore (was it bigger than Oblivion? I should probably look this shit up, huh?), and you could literally go anywhere you wanted. No invisible walls stopping you from walking to Skyrim (it didn’t exist in MW though, so good luck getting there :P), no unreachable ledges (PC USED LEVITATE FOREVER, because that was so much fun)…
It was the best sandbox game. Yes, it had it’s problems, and looking at it now, I feel very claustrophobic playing it.
YODAUG, I HEARD YOU LIKE FOG.
Okay, maybe not ‘very’ still, the game shows it’s age. I guess that’s to be expected – I mean, go play some other game from 10 years ago? The only ‘niggles’ I have are from not being used to opening the menu with RMB and not Tab. If that’s the best I can come up with (that really annoyed me in my few hours of playing it over the last day and a half), then it’s gotta be doing something right, right?
Yes, a rare, endangered text post. How novel. Obviously, I’ve been enjoying doing the Arcane Envoy Plays… series quite a lot, to the detriment of writing posts for here. >>;;
Right now I’m right at the precipice of the storm. Over the next week I’ve got exams out the wazoo, and after that, NaNoWriMo cometh. (Which might cut into my time to write text posts)
You should get another episode or two sometime in the next week, but I’m not 100% sure. Worst case you’ll get one on Friday, I suppose? The idea is to release another episode or two before the poll expires (some time on the 30th), but we’ll see. I can always extend the poll’s length or something.
Ultimately the idea of the poll is to get some feedback, without ‘attacking’ people for opinions, or forcing you to even reveal your identity (as you would if you commented, I guess).
I’d like to make content people are at least a little bit interested in, just because why bother sharing things if nobody cares?
Anyway, content might be a bit sparse the next week or so, I dunno.
Posted in Rants
Yes, I can actually type with words and shit. I know, crazy, right? Today we’re going to look at the “indie darling”
Yeah… what can I say about Minecraft. I think it’s great. And, as we’re coming up to summer, it allows me to talk about “summer games”.
Summer games are basically games that make me think of Summer. (Complicated, right?) Minecraft still reminds me of the long summer I spent working on my own server with some good friends (Avareii & Brillig, most notably).
Anyway, I loved those days. Listening to “Fly Away” on repeat for hours upon hours, building and digging and building. It was fun, plain and simple.
Now there are lots of other things to do in MC apart from digging and building, but those are the parts I liked most. That being said, most of this year has been spent playing Vechs’ Super Hostile maps. Lots of fun there, but very different to what I liked about the game before.
I actually really got to like combat, once you don’t have to worry about creepers blowing up your hours of construction (well, you did, but the point wasn’t to make pretty things and dig shit up, the point was to fight hordes of enemies).
Anyway, I liked building things. It was fun. I also really liked to explore, because that was always something I found kinda appealing, I guess. The idea of exploring uncharted territory is very… romantic, I guess.
Anyway, it’s funny, for the price it’s probably the best value I’ve got from a game in a very long time, but I don’t think I’ve really played it much. Never underestimate the power of a regular (well… relatively regular) updating schedule?
Today we get to look at the most blogged about game on this blog (recently, at least) League of Legends.
Now, despite that header, I do quite enjoy League, and now I’ve gotten a bit better at it (and have bought a few more champions) I’m finding that I can enjoy it quite a bit.
My main problems with League are that I’m not really at my best when playing on a team. Like, I get performance anxiety, I guess you could say? Thankfully, I’ve mostly gotten over that when playing with my League Friends (League Friend & League Guys I Know But Not Really That Well?), but playing with randoms still freaks me out a bit.
Similarly, I freak out more when playing real games, as they’re actually important (most bot games are impossible to lose, they just take some time) in theory, at least.
What I like about League is the basic idea of pushing a lane and taking out a tower – it’s simple and relaxing, I’m less of a fan of teamfights, but I’ve gotten used to them a bit more with the advent of Dominion and playing a bit more in general (I’m not good, but I’m not as much of a burden as I used to be).
The other thing I like is playing with friends. 5 is a pretty good number of people, honestly if I could get a group of 5 friends to run 5-man content in MMOs with or whatever (where just running 5-mans isn’t a waste of time because they’re all in like fucking raid gear and just kill everything without trying) I’d probably be quite content doing that.
It’s nice to hop onto Skype and talk to people, to joke around, and whatnot. While I don’t know if I’d call them all friends (as I said, I don’t know most of them very well at all), they are, basically friends. It’s nice to have that sort of relaxed atmosphere to play with (I imagine that playing ranked games would remove that fun – even real games (classic/dominion) are more serious and therefore less fun) .
Anyway, getting back to the crux of the issue, actual gameplay. There are a squidillion different champions, which means that the game supports lots of different play styles. Stepping back a little bit, we get the mechanics of the game, which involves the one thing I hate the most, which is rewarding the team that is beating the pants off the other – I really find that sort of domino effect to be detrimental to a game… while it feels good when you’re winning, it feels really bad when you know you’re going to lose a 40 minute game at the 15 minute mark.
Everything else is mostly fine… while there are lots of balance issues, it doesn’t really matter for the most part. I guess the main thing I enjoy about League is playing with friends. It’s funny how that can change I game I don’t really like, and turn it into something I’ll sit in the lobby of all day.
Next time: I talk about some other game or something?